L'orchidée sauvage

Lawyer (Carre Otis) is sent to Rio to help her boss with a real estate deal (Jacqueline Bisset) and gets herself mixed up with her client (Mickey Rourke) and throwing her morals out the door in the process. Steamy and very erotic with some very hot sexual encounters and a great looking cast, but empty and with little to offer besides lots of hot sex and lush cinematography.

Wild Orchid is one of the most sexually explicit movies I recall seeing as a child. While the film is tame by today's standards when released in 1990 it was very explict. The storyline isn't to much to really speak of but Zalman King keeps Carrie Otis naked enough times to where the male viewer doesn't really care. The final sex scene makes you wonder if Rourke and Otis really went at it.

Wild Orchid is a steamy erotic flick that probably won't please everybody. Young lawyer Emily is signed to a law firm and flies with her boss to Rio and when Emily's boss leaves for a meeting, she sets Emily up with Wheeler, a successful real estate developer who Emily is attracted to, but cannot have because he is impotent. This leads to Wheeler setting Emily up with an American business man for sex, cross dressing, and steamy sexual pairings. While the R Rated cut of Wild Orchid is quite graphic, the Unrated version is even more so. If you like trashy drama and erotic scenes, then you might enjoy Wild Orchid.

Wild Orchid is Unrated for extremely strong graphic sexuality, nudity, adult language, and for some mild violence.

Wild Orchid... I saw this in early 1990 at a $1 theatre. I had seen ads for it on TV and had wanted to see it but until the cheap theatre, I didn't go.

Now, I was 21 at the time and knowing what was "supposed" to be in the film, I couldn't wait to "see it all".

Needless to say I was quickly let down. I expected a realstory to be with it of course but, I couldn't follow whatever was supposed to be going on with the characters and found the dialouge just downright tedious to pretentious. (Even boring.)

As for the actual sex scenes? Probably I got into "that" at the time (you find few 21 year olds who wouldn't). I know I stayed to the end though, although I had a valid enough reason to walk out, although I don't know why I stayed for the closing credits. .

Maybe the people behind this thought that since it's geared twords sex and Rourke's issues or hers...or both, they had to make little effort in better story writing. I wonder how the director found these acting performances to be good enough. Or anyone involved.

What I find wrong in the movie's characters, is that I have no valid reason to care anything about them. In a movie, we're supposed to be able to understand and maybe even like the characters.

Even more simply put, they dont seem like honest human beings, they're like soulless entities that don't have any emoting ability beyond speaking and 'impersonating' what should be a believable reaction.

I found a video of this sometime ago, in pretty good shape, bought it and gave it a second look. I was thinking, "Hey maybe it wasn't as bad as I recall."

Well, the acting was still as forgettable as it was then and it's overall look , now seriously dated and the movie itself, beyond irrelavant .

The sex scenes , now seemed lifeless and / or robotic.

For me, 1 star . I donated the tape and I'm done watching it for good. (END)

There is more, I think, to this film than most people give it credit for. Sure, it's full of sex and naked people, but it also manages to be erotic and sensual at the same time. It's certainly not the commercialized absurdity that you'll find late night on certain premium channels. More than that, though, is that it's a decent psychological study of a man who's completely divorced himself from reality. Like so many celebs of our time, money and success has allowed him to distance himself from whatever parts of reality that make him uncomfortable. Emily's naive and honest approach manages to reach him. His speech near the end, before the final 'scene,' is really impressive, and Mikey really is a great actor. Sure, Ms. Otis leaves something to be desired, but she's working in a role where her lack of comfort helps the part. Emily is out of her element, just is the actress playing her is, and even if this makes her transparent, it also makes her believable. Jaqueline Bisset is wonderful as always. All in all, if you watch this film without fast forwarding from sex scene to sex scene, you'll see a fairly human story mixed with a sexual journey that I think Zora Neale Hurston would have appreciated.